Dead And Buried

Fry shrugged. ‘Maybe the Whartons thought he was going to betray them. He must have realised the whole thing was going to come out. Perhaps he decided to get in first with his confession. But someone else had their own plan. It was pretty desperate, and they couldn’t allow Merritt to throw a spanner in the works. They were never going to let him start talking, not to anyone.’

‘He looked like a weak link, I suppose,’ said Cooper.

‘Yes. So they got him to the Light House on some pretext, and made sure he didn’t talk. The question is, who betrayed whom?’

Cooper shook his head sadly. ‘That’s the wrong question. In the end, they all betrayed themselves.’

Fry looked at him. ‘You were lucky,’ she said. ‘Lucky that you survived the attack on Wednesday night. Or perhaps they just wanted to put you in hospital and stop you asking the wrong questions.’

‘You mean the right questions.’

‘I suppose.’

Fry turned away.

‘Feel like picking up Ian Gullick and Vince Naylor again?’ called Cooper as she left, but she didn’t respond.

Even as he said it, he wondered whether he was in danger of rubbing it in too much. His decision to arrest and question Gullick and Naylor had been correct, though not perhaps for the right reasons.

Cooper went to collect his jacket and car keys from his desk in the CID room. He found Gavin Murfin filling a waste-paper bin with the contents of his drawers, and Becky Hurst looking at him expectantly, waiting for news of progress.

‘It seems you were wrong after all, Gavin,’ said Cooper.

‘There’s a first time for everything,’ said Murfin casually.

‘So Maurice Wharton killed the Pearsons, is that right?’ said Hurst. ‘But he must have had some help afterwards.’

‘Some of his regulars, we think.’

‘They helped to cover up for him?’

‘So it seems.’

‘I don’t understand it,’ said Hurst. ‘How did Wharton inspire such loyalty? I mean, by all accounts he was a complete pain in the backside, who liked nothing better than insulting and abusing his customers.’

‘True. And anyone who didn’t know him took offence and never came back. But those others, the regulars — they must have seen through all that nonsense and recognised a different Maurice.’

‘If you ask me, they just didn’t want to see the pub closed down,’ said Murfin. ‘One thing you have to say about Mad Maurice — he kept a very good cellar. His beer was always top-notch. You can’t say that about any of these keg places you see all over the shop now. Besides, he wasn’t averse to a good lock-in when he was in the mood.’

‘Not that you ever went to one, Gavin, considering it’s illegal.’

‘Course not. I just heard.’

‘Well, it’s right that his regulars were the people who kept him in business all those years,’ said Cooper. ‘They were the ones who kept coming back month after month, who spread his reputation far and wide. He owed a lot to those customers. Without them, he was nothing. And I don’t suppose he wanted to let them down by closing the pub.’

‘Is this all a question of loyalty, then?’ asked Hurst, still puzzled. ‘Maurice Wharton being loyal to his customers, and his regulars being loyal to him?’

‘Yes, but loyalty is where it went wrong,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s always a mistake involving someone else in an act like that. Most people can’t even rely on themselves to keep a secret. But the suspicion that you can’t trust a person who shares your guilty knowledge will really eat away at you over time. These people had more than two years of it. Frankly, it’s a wonder they didn’t try to kill each other long before now.’

DI Hitchens strolled into the room and put his arm on Cooper’s shoulder as he listened to the end of the conversation.

‘And the fires?’ he said. ‘The same people are responsible for those, I gather.’

‘There’s been a coordinated campaign going on,’ said Cooper. ‘The fires on Kinder were started deliberately and the temporary reservoir was sabotaged, but only as part of a diversion — to draw away firefighting resources. The real target was always on Oxlow Moor. Specifically, the Light House.’

‘The chief fire officer is happy anyway,’ said Hitchens. ‘They like to identify people who start wildfires on the moors. Normally it’s far too difficult for them to prove a fire was started deliberately, even when there’s no doubt in their own minds. Even if there’s no prosecution, they’re glad to get a confirmed arson.’

Cooper nodded. He wondered if he should mention the irony that it was the chief fire officer himself who’d given the Whartons the idea of starting the fires. His comments in that TV interview had been well intentioned, but had fallen on the wrong ears. He might have thought he was doing good PR for the fire service, but mentioning the threat to isolated buildings had been a fatal suggestion to insert into the minds of desperate people.

He rattled his car keys as he was about to leave the office with Villiers, but turned back for a moment.

‘Gavin …’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Why is it that you never mentioned the word “cellar” until now? It could have saved a lot of trouble.’